A long time ago, a galaxy far away

My first exposure to Star Wars was not by name. It was in when I was a sophomore in college (76-77), and was at the Pizza Keg in West Lafayette, Ind, with a group of other D&D players/SCAers/ and SF Fans. One of them was talking about a new movie coming out.

"It's science fiction," he said, "But the guys in the white space armor are the bad guys".

And that's the first I had learned about Star Wars.

It is kind of strange, in our media-savvy universe to see something like this creep up on people. I was aware of a novel (it showed up in the local at the Stewart Center (Purdue's student union)  for two weeks, before being rotated out). I think there was a very excited and long article in TIME that showed up the week of release.

And there were the radio ads. Yes, radio ads. They played all summer. I don't know if they do radio ads for movies anymore, but we had radio ads. I still remember "The Death Breath of the Dark Lord".



And then, the movie itself. It played in ONE LOCATION in Pittsburgh during that first run. And that was a multiplex out near Monroeville, twenty miles away. So our D&D gang gathered together, carpooled in our parents cars, and made the trip out, to a packed weekend theater and a line (a line! for an SF movie!) out front.

Once inside, the lights went down, and the opening drumroll for 20th Cent Fox. The simple tagline on the screen, the John Williams anthem, and the crawl.

And then that first shot, over Tatooine, of the blockade runner pursued by the Star Destroyer. The Star Destroyer that filled the top of the screen, and KEPT ON COMING. And you thought it was done, but no, that was just the cargo bay, there was MORE SHIP to come.

That was the gosh-wow moment for me. I was willing to buy everything else after that moment.

That's what I remember about the first Star Wars movie. I think we made the pilgrimage about a dozen times. Me, the future Lovely Bride, and the members of our D&D group. One time I took my little sister (who would have 13, and was impressed that my friend Frank could do a Wookiee imitation). Once the theater was so full, we had to sit in the front row, and the star destroyer rumbled overhead. And it was really cool.

More later,

Temple, Tower, Tomb

By Mystra! I've found Rob King!

Still busy, and it doesn't look like it is going to get un-busy for a while. This means I will not be part of the A to Z Challenge this year. But I want to share this.

Back when I worked for TSR, my face appeared a couple game products.Some artists work from live models, and the staff provided a nice resource (Giogi Wyvernspur on the cover of The Wyvern's Spur was one of our legal staff).  And one of the cool ones I posed for was for a product called Temple, Tower, & Tomb, by Paul (now Jennell) Jacquays. Now Jennell is selling the piece on Etsy.

So here I am, in my full Mountain-Man beardage of that era. The robe was based on my Obi-Wan Kenobi cloak that the Lovely Bride made for me (and which remains one of the warmest things I own). The rune-covered lapels were Jennell's addition, and contain the secret message.

More later,

A Game Divided Against Itself

There has been a lot of news on the 'net about the Next Iteration of D&D (WotC is not calling it 5E, even if the media and fans are, and I will support this view for as long a I feel like it). The coverage has been interesting, but one thing I've seen a lot of is that the legendary Edition Wars of 4E/Essentials versus 3/3.5/Pathfinder have "split the hobby".

To which I have to say - this is news?

Most of D&D's lifespan has consisted of D&D product competing against itself, usually (but not always) against other D&D product produced by TSR/WotC competing against itself. Here's a partial listing that comes to mind of the story so far:

Original D&D versus the various Basic Sets. What is now called Original D&D (the little books in the little woodgrain or white boxes) originally showed up in hobby stores and mimed miniature rules of that era in format, presentation, and structure. The various early Basic Sets (later subdivided as Holmes, Moldvay Basic, Basic/Expert) were flat boxes with more frontage, but started out with a limited number of levels (introductory crippleware, if you prefer). Those who were weaned on (O) D&D were a bit skeptical of these new kids with their easier-to-understand, more mass-market game (something you're going to see many times here). Only the extinction of that OD&D caused them to move on, and then to AD&D (see below).

D&D versus other FRPs - The  Success of D&D brought about a small host of Fantasy RPG competitors, but let's keep this to the obvious D&D knockoffs. Some of these were attempts to improve/fix/expand the game game (Arduin Grimoire) comes to mind, while others were more about cashing in. The most notable of these were Mayfair's roleaids series, which not only used the D&D rules, but (through reasons I'm not sure of - I wasn't there at the start, but got sucked in over the years), could continue to do so, as long as they put something on the cover saying that TSR did not approve of them using those rules. Sort of a Bizarro license - they were allowed to publish, as long as it was clear the licensor had nothing to do with it. Some were good, many were bad, some were adventures written for conventions. Minor, but this continued into the 90s.

D&D versus AD&D - Most people know of the split between the Arneson/Gygax D&D and the Gygax only AD&D, which again, had its roots before I got to the company. For most of my (O)D&D gang, we made the switch over the two years of release of AD&D. D&D, at one point, was planned to be opened up into a wah-hoo over-the-top game (One of the older artists hit me up at a convention and wanted to know if I had known about it when I did Spelljammer). As it turned out, the version of D&D known as BECMI (Basic/Expert/Companion/Masters/Immortals) produced a steady expansion of rules into high-level play, an excellent one-volume Rules Cyclopedia, and a well-organized campaign setting called the Known World but eventually renamed as Mystara.

AD&D (1st Edition) versus AD&D (2nd Edition) - This split is not nearly as bad as you would think, in part because we made the case when we released 2nd Edition AD&D was more of a collection of "stuff that worked" from 1st edition, and existed in part to reduce the entire weight of what we were covering. (I joked at the time about how you needed your official AD&D fork lift to haul the stuff around. How little I knew then ...) Stuff went away and other tweaks showed up, but it was a relatively smooth transition. There were those who preferred 1st edition AD&D, but in those early Internet days, the conflicts between the two editions were minor.

AD&D 2 versus (AD&D Multitude of Worlds) - This is hailed as being a horrible, horrible thing by modern conventional thought, in that creating all these worlds thereby created too much choice, and spawned all of these smaller worlds that demanded attention and brought back limited results. Yet for a while, AD&D ruled the roost bycapturing and dominating shelf space and player mind-share. This was a time of the "Flavors of Fantasy" ruled the roost, and TSR attempted to be all things to all gamers by providing options. Looking back on this, I think it was a good move, and I learned a few things (but which merit a completely different post).

 

AD&D (1st/2nd Edition) versus D&D (3rd Edition) - This was a major break, the transition made easier by a change of management (and location) and a willingness and ability of the new guys to pillory the previous editions (Most of all the revised 2nd Ed of its later years). Those following previous editions were simply ignored for the new shiny, the idea being that if it was cool enough the old grogs would come back to the fold. The business plan did not care, to quote one executive 3rd". "If any player of 2nd Edition came over to 3rd.". We had T-shirts made mocking 2nd Edition weaknesses. And it was successful.

D&D 3rd Edition versus the OGL - The OGL, short for Open Gaming License, kicked off a glut of games from other publishers using the D&D Engine. Originally one of the in-house selling points for the OGL was that the smaller companies would pick up the small stuff - adventure modules and support product that would be of marginal profitability. What happened, of course, was that third parties launched full-fledged into hardbacks and full product lines, without the benefits of scale that a larger publisher provided.  Note that while having a huge host of competing campaign settings and rules was a BAD thing for 2nd Edition, it was just dandy when those settings and rules were published by others. No, I don't get that logic, either.

D&D 4th Edition versus (3rd/3.5/Pathfinder) And this is the huggamugga you've heard about, the most recent of the splits, the great Edition Wars. 4E in many ways tried to launch the same way 3E did, but the fan base wasn't going to have it (making fun of the involuted 3E grappling rules didn't win any allies, even if it was true (and hilarious)). And furthermore, with the OGL, they could still have new products not controlled by the company holding the D&D name. As a result, D&D is supposedly broken between them. People playing different games with the same name is a problem.

And it may only be solved by (wait for it) a new edition.

Looking at the listing of the various internal conflicts above, I have come to the conclusion that D&D has always had self-created, often internal competition, and that this is a feature of the game, not a bug. And furthermore, it is a good thing. It creates a robust environment that can bring in new ideas. (Remember THAC0? That wasn't an in-house thing, but rather came from tournament games that needed to quickly figure its to-hit numbers). It allows for flavors of fantasy that reach out to many different styles of play. It provided growth and evolution of the game over time. And it allows the game to reach out to new generations through that growth, and those new players to take "their" version of the game to heart, as they know it is superior to all that has come before, and all that is to follow.

And those are good things, all in all.

More later,

Grognards

Let me lay out my credentials. I started playing with Airfix plastic soldiers when I was but a child, and quickly graduated to the Milton Bradley/American Heritage Series of games (Dogfight, Battlecry, and Hit the Beach). I got into board wargames in junior high. My first real (hexes and paper chits) wargame was Avalon Hill's Panzer Blitz, and my first issue of S&T was Fall of Rome (1973). I got into RPGs in the fall of '75, in my freshman year of college, back when the game consisted of three little booklets in a fake wood-grain box, along with the Greyhawk supplement.

Yet despite this rich (and aged) heritage, I am afraid I am not a grognard.

"Grognard" is an evolving word. It takes its origin from Napoleon's veteran grenadiers, who had seen their way through many campaigns, and were known as "The Grumblers" (though the modern translation of "grumbler" in french is grognon. It jumped the species boundary into wargaming as a reference to older gamers in general (according to this story from Alan Emerich, quoting Jim Dunnigan).

This was in the mid-seventies, and the phrase quickly spread among the gaming fans. For our group at Purdue University, the term referred to the older gamers at the university's gaming club. Most of these guys were miniatures gamers - primarily WWII armor but some Napoleonics as well (which may have aided the adoption of the name). There was some early friction between the tankers (who would push three tables together, cover it with a green dropcloth, and spend the Sunday afternoon with their tape measures and panzers) and the D&Ders (who would also want three tables for a host of younger gamers, and spend all the time talking). So for me, the term grognard is usually a wargamer, tape-measure and spotting charts in hand.

Now that definition has moved on, so that now a grognard is now an adamant fan of older games, particularly games that are no longer in print, or that have been revised to the point they no longer resemble their original. There is a grapeshot-whiff of nostalgia among these nouveau grogs, which often blossoms into a full-fledged mad-on about anything more recent than Unearthed Arcana. They are fans a particular era, and anything since has gone beyond the pale, jumped the shark, nuked the fridge, and passed into the lower planes in a handbasket.

In the D&D world, these new grogs tends to collect around the time of one of the early basic sets (called the "Holmes Basic" after its editor), aided by the first Monster Manual (back in those days, we got ONE hardback a year, and we LIKED IT!). That puts it about 1977, and was the time when D&D made its big explosion into a larger market. I have a lot of friends who came to the hobby in this era. And it was a good time join, since without a solid grounding in miniatures gaming, those original little booklet rules were pretty darned impenetrable.

So I should be among these later-day grognards. Heck, my history PREDATES theirs. I still have a copy of Tractics on my shelf, for Gary's sake. I should be telling THEM to get off my role-playing lawn.

Yet I can't - I've been an early adapter of many of the revolutions in gaming (Computers, CCGs, prepainted plastic miniatures), have missed others (LARPs, ARGs), and have seen a few that never were (anyone remember Disk Wars?). Why can't I get into the spirit of declaring my own personal golden age, and bemoaning that after that, there came the deluge?

I think part of it is because I see gaming as an evolving thing, sometimes smoothly, and sometimes (like in the break between the tankers and the D&Ders, the arrival of CCGs, or the current edition wars) with a sharp disconnect. Each new generation brings its own experiences to the party, and creates new things. I don't always agree with new developments, but I see potential solutions in the next generation beyond, as opposed to retrenching in the past.

And part of it also the recognition that the first drafts of great new ideas are just that - first drafts. D&D blossomed with problematic rules. Magic: The Gathering was infested with broken cards. Early computer adventure games had, to be kind, primitive graphics. The "Indie Game Movement" has both the blessing and the curse of self-publishing.

I like the original D&D, but I also like the various incarnations of Basic, A&D, 2nd Ed, 3rd Ed, and now 4th Ed. And I will probably be around for 5th and 6th as well, as the conversation continues and the game continues to evolve. The new edition of White Wolf's World of Darkness does not offend me (though I really like what Monte Cook did for them with the same basic building blocks). I've drifted away from Magic and World of Warcraft and many other games, and drifted back (a couple times).

I love my old games, but I'm equally curious about where we go next.

More later,